I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to wireless communications, and more specifically to techniques for signal acquisition in a wireless communication system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication services; for instance, voice, video, packet data, broadcast, and messaging services may be provided via such wireless communication systems. These systems may be multiple-access systems that are capable of supporting communication for multiple terminals by sharing available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems.
In a wireless communication system, a base station typically processes (e.g., encodes and symbol maps) data to obtain modulation symbols and then further processes the modulation symbols to generate a modulated signal. A base station then typically transmits the modulated signal via a communication channel. Further, such a system often uses a transmission scheme whereby data is transmitted in frames, with each frame having a particular duration in time.
A wireless terminal in the system may not know which base stations, if any, near its vicinity are transmitting. Furthermore, the terminal may not know the start of each frame for a given base station, the time at which each frame is transmitted by the base station, or the propagation delay introduced by the communication channel. Thus, a terminal can perform signal acquisition to detect for transmissions from base stations in the system and to synchronize to the timing and frequency of each detected base stations of interest. By using the signal acquisition process, a terminal can ascertain the timing of a detected base station and properly perform complementary demodulation for the base station.
Typically, both a base station and a terminal expend system resources to support signal acquisition. Since signal acquisition overhead is necessary for data transmission, it is desirable to minimize the amount of resources used by both base stations and terminals for acquisition. Thus, there is a need in the art for techniques to efficiently perform signal acquisition in a wireless communication system.